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TOWARD AN AFRICAN FUTURE—
OF THE LIMIT OF WORLD
SERIES EDITORS
David E. Johnson, Comparative Literature, University at Buffalo

Scott Michaelsen, English, Michigan State University
SERIES ADVISORY BOARD
Nahum Dimitri Chandler, African American Studies, University of California, Irvine

Rebecca Comay, Philosophy and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto
Marc Crépon, Philosophy, École Normale Supérieure, Paris
Jonathan Culler, Comparative Literature, Cornell University
Johanna Drucker, Design Media Arts and Information Studies,
University of California, Los Angeles
Christopher Fynsk, Modern Thought, Aberdeen University
Rodolphe Gasché, Comparative Literature, University at Buffalo
Martin Hägglund, Comparative Literature, Yale University
Carol Jacobs, German and Comparative Literature, Yale University
Peggy Kamuf, French and Comparative Literature, University of Southern California
David Marriott, History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz
Steven Miller, English, University at Buffalo
Alberto Moreiras, Hispanic Studies, Texas A&M University
Patrick O’Donnell, English, Michigan State University
Pablo Oyarzun, Teoría del Arte, Universidad de Chile
Scott Cutler Shershow, English, University of California, Davis
Henry Sussman, German and Comparative Literature, Yale University
Samuel Weber, Comparative Literature, Northwestern University
Ewa Ziarek, Comparative Literature, University at Buffalo
TOWARD AN AFRICAN FUTURE—
OF THE LIMIT OF WORLD
NAHUM DIMITRI CHANDLER

Cover: Photo of W. E. B. Du Bois lecturing on Africa, 1956. The W. E. B. Du Bois
Papers (MS 312). Courtesy of the Special Collections and University Archives,
University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Cover design by Francis Nunoo-Quarcoo.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2021 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever

without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic,
magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior
permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY

www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Chandler, Nahum Dimitri, author.

Title: Toward an African future—of the limit of world / Nahum Dimitri Chandler.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2021] | Series:
SUNY series, literature . . . in theory | Includes bibliographical references and
index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020040172 (print) | LCCN 2020040173 (ebook) | ISBN
9781438484198 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438484204 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt),
1868–1963—Criticism and interpretation. | Du Bois, W. E. B. (William
Edward Burghardt), 1868–1963. Color and democracy. | Du Bois, W. E. B.
(William Edward Burghardt), 1868–1963. World and Africa. | American
literature—African American authors—History and criticism. | Critical theory—
United States—20th century. | Historiography—United States. | Imperialism—
Historiography. | Race relations—History. | Africa—Historiography.
Classification: LCC PS3507.U147 Z56 2021 (print) | LCC PS3507.U147 (ebook) |
DDC 960—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040172
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040173
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Nancy Tierney
(1955–2000)
am memoriam.
She understood the meaning of being black/Black
at the dawning of the twenty-first century.
Contents
Acknowledgments / ix
Preface / xi
Incipit / 1
Example / 3
Exemplarity / 29
Repassage / 53
Annotation I / 59
Annotation II / 67
Annotation III / 75
Annotation IV / 85
Notes / 107
Note on Citations / 117
References / 119
Index / 131
Acknowledgments
This text has been presented in several contexts. Two symposia at Queen
Mary, University of London (sponsored by way of support from the School
of Business and Management at Queen Mary) sparked its present form: most
recently, “Historiographies and Cartographies of Global Capitalism‒Labour,”
October 13‒15, 2011 (organized under the auspices of the Centre for Eth-
ics and Politics [CfEP] at Queen Mary, by its director, Denise Ferreira da
Silva, whom I thank; in the event, David Lloyd and Nicholas De Genova’s
respective, generous, engagements led me to attempt to render more clearly
the terms of my proposed intervention); and earlier, “Post-Colonial Capital-
ism: A Two-Day Symposium,” held at the Goodenough Club, London, on
October 15‒16, 2009 (organized by Stefano Harney, then of Queen Mary,
University of London and Miguel Mellino, of Università degli Studi di
Napoli, L’Orientale). In addition, I am grateful for the engagement of my
fellow participants during the 2009 session, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Fred
Moten, Ranabir Smaddar, and Sandro Mezzadra, for their rich provocations.
In addition, sections were presented at the kind invitation of Tsunehiko Kato
of Ritsumeikan University (Japan) in his capacity as president of the Japan
Black Studies Association (Kokujin Kenkyu no Kai) as part of the plenary
symposium “Black Studies in the Age of Globalization” at the 57th annual
meeting of the Association in Kyoto, Japan, June 25, 2011. Professor Kato’s
formulation of the question of the symposium—distributed in written form
to both the panelists, which included John McLeod of Leeds University (UK),
Amrijit Singh of Ohio University (USA), and Lee Yu-cheng of Academica
Sinica (Taiwan), and to the participants in the conference—is a basic refer-
ence for the context of my contribution to the symposium. For, my remarks
here are offered as one gesture of a potential interlocution. Likewise, some
parts of this text in its present form were presented at “An International
ix
x Acknowledgments
Conference: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Question of Another World, II,”

held on June 6‒8, 2007, at the Renaissance Center, located in Shinagawa,
Tokyo, under the auspices of the School of Global Studies, both of Tama
University. And finally, an earlier formulation of thought was presented at
“The Future of Utopia: A Conference in Honor of Fredric Jameson,” in
the Literature Program at Duke University, April 23‒24, 2003. I warmly
thank both Prof. Jameson and Prof. Alberto Moreiras, former colleagues
and now ongoing friends, for the latter invitation. And then, at the root,
the late Yaw Abankwa Manu of Ghana and Yacine Kouyaté of Mali named
the voice announced herein and first raised it up for a hearing. My relation
to their solidarity is more and deeper than one of gratitude. It is the living
of life and death, whatever is such, together. Now, Franc Nunoo-Quarcoo,
born of three continents—in the art of his gift of design—must also be
announced herein. I thank the editors of CR: The New Centennial Review
and Michigan State University Press for permission to excerpt passages from
texts presented in that journal (6, no. 3 and 12, no. 1). On November 17,
2014, at the UC Riverside, David Lloyd, Jodi Kim, and Ashon Crawley
engaged me carefully in faculty seminar. At the University of Oregon,
May 4, 2016, Sharon Luk set a touchstone seminar, as Lara Bovilsky, then
Joseph Fracchia, each made me welcome. At New York University, October
17, 2018, Annmaria Shimabuku, with Yoon Jeong Oh, allowed this text
amplitude as a base for generous discussion. Rashné Limki, of the Living
Commons Collective, wonderfully brought Limkigraphics of Mumbai, India,
to make possible the 2013 edition, the first, for which I remain profoundly
grateful. Cover photo credit: W. E. B. Du Bois, 1956; reproduced from the
W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312), by courtesy of the Special Collections
and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. For
this edition, a salutation to Toumani Diabaté, father, with his son Sidiki, for
the elder’s composition “Lampedusa,” resonant also in “Tunkaranke,” both
so ancient and so new, across the generations and across the geographies. A
faculty publication grant from the University of California, Irvine, Humanities
Center graciously supported the publication of the SUNY Press edition of
this book. Finally, I thank the scholars and curators, beginning with Prof.
H. L. Gates Jr., who made possible the epistemological articulation of the
2017 documentary series Africa’s Great Civilizations, for it accompanied me
during the time of the final preparation of the four annotations added for
this edition (McGann 2019).
Preface
This study proposes the value of the presentation of the global level histo-
riographical example in the discourse of W. E. B. Du Bois for theoretical
reflection about contemporary historicity. It proceeds first by way of an outline
of the catholicity of his engagement with such figures on a worldwide scale
of reference. Further, it then explores the question of the place of a certain
conception, in which the itinerary of modern slavery is crucial, of the his-
toricity of modern colonialism and its aftermath within Du Bois’s thought.
The theoretical disposition in question is adumbrated by taking reference to
two nodal texts by Du Bois, both of which were issued in the immediate
aftermath of the Second World War: Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace
(1945) and The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part which Africa Has
Played in World History (1947). Building from a perspective that Du Bois
had begun to develop in the closing decade of the nineteenth century, but
which he productively elaborated across his entire mature course of thought
and practice, those texts fundamentally questioned the dominant premises
taking shape to define the post‒World War II global order, in particular
the Bretton Woods system, at its inception, and delineated a profound
sense of the implication—the limits—that it portended for collective forms
of human existence for decades, and perhaps centuries, to come. Yet, too,
within his octogenarian’s sensibility a certain equally profound sense of hope
found its way to a renewed kinetic articulation in thought and imagination.
For, therein, Du Bois’s critical affirmation of the differential articulation of
historial profile, beyond the limits of modern colonial horizons or their
aftermaths, was otherwise than retrospective. Rather, it was a pragmatic
problematization of the past such that its organization could be shown to
yield the very terms for the formulation of hope for a future that had not
yet shown its face or found its right of historical passage. As such, thinking
xi
xii Preface
with Du Bois’s initiative in engaging the radical order of the organization

of the historial, the name Africa may be adduced as a theoretical metaphor
that could propose a certain hyperbolic renarrativization of the systems of
modern historicity, not only as pasts, but as futures. In such a path of
thought, necessity in the form of a certain finality, even as placed under
the mark of death, may well be understood to yet always remain distended
in its own possibility. In such a thought, limit can only show by way of its
other side: that is, possibility. Limit, approached on the order of necessity
itself, if you will, is still, always, thus already a thought of the future as
possibility. Such a thought may outline one path to think with and beyond
the contemporary forms of the afterlife of modern slavery, colonialism, and
imperialism.
For this edition, I have included four annotations: two on the twin
major texts noted above, respectively; another on two essays—of the same
locution as those two books—written by Du Bois astride the 1940s and the
aftermath of the Second World War; and an additional annotation on three
major references to music given by Du Bois in his 1945 text. The general
bibliographic notation has been revised, as a note on citations.
July 2020
Incipit
If one accepts the epistemic imperatives of the example, its status as an

always ensemblic apparition of the supposed proper, and also, thus, its
status as a certain order of name for both the limit and the possibility of
thought, it might well be engaged as the announcement of an atopic order
of existence that nonetheless is, if you will, only in its immanent appearance:
as a site or a seam, an irruption yielded by way of the concatenation that
is a fault line; or, as something like the fractual force of waves on the high
ocean; or, the terrible heat of a sudden and massive efflorescence, of flame,
moving across the desert of the mind’s-eye-memory, arising from the sharp
and textured frisson of rock against rock; or, according to a distribution
of force that takes form, if at all, in the general figure of the cantilever,
whether as mountain or bridge.
The atopic in this sense is simply an other-than-proper-name of the
passage beyond—at the limit of world.
This, if at all, is the fractual immeasurable measure by which we might
approach the question of the utopic as a matter of existence.
How might such an anorientation—that is, a certain tarrying with the
intractable character of that which opens the possibility of orientation in
general and problematizes in reciprocal fashion, thus that which has often
been called the orient in particular—allow us to move with the discourse of
one W. E. B. Du Bois in such a manner that it might assist us in thinking
through the limit of world—of our sense of world, of this here and this
now—toward another passage, other than simply the planetary? Perhaps we
can accede to its bequest if we accept it as a paradoxical orientation to a
problem for thought, as a relation to a practical-theoretical task, as resource
for the gathering of our step or gesture in the carriage of the hyperbolic
difficulty of theoretical labor in our time, whatever is such. That is to say,
1
2 Toward an African Future—Of the Limit of World
in such passage, always within the possibility of, yet always other than,
what has been produced by way of a practice under the guidance of the
transcendental, there will always have been, examples, perhaps only.1
Example
We can open our consideration in medias res, as it were, by reckoning that

for Du Bois the Negro American example, incipiting for him as fate or
instituted chance, overdetermined in both its freedom and its necessity, posed
a question about possibility—ontological and historical, onto-historial—that
remained exorbitant for traditional formulations of philosophical question in
the modern epoch. The Negro American example, in Du Bois’s discourse,
is always both and neither, never the simple, always a figure of the double,
and never exemplary of the so-called pure, whatever such might be. Thus,
from Du Bois’s pen comes the inimitable concept-metaphors at the time
of the writing of The Souls of Black Folk in the years straddling the turn of
the twentieth century—“the veil,” “double consciousness,” “intermingling,”
“second-sight,” “the dawning,” “the gift,” or even “America,” for example.
Thus, the question with which he closed that text—one that is itself already
a kind of response—could stand as the exemplary form of a world historical
question.
Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed

we were here. Here we have brought our three gifts and mingled
them with yours: a gift of story and song—soft, stirring melody
in an ill-harmonized and unmelodious land; the gift of sweat
and brawn to beat back the wilderness, conquer the soil, and
lay the foundations of this vast economic empire two hundred
years earlier than your weak hands could have done it; the
third, a gift of the Spirit. Around us the history of the land has
centered for thrice a hundred years; out of the nation’s heart we
have called all that was best to throttle and subdue all that was
worst; fire and blood, prayer and sacrifice, have billowed over
3
this people, and they have found peace only in the altars of the
God of Right. Nor has our gift of the Spirit been merely passive.
Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof
of this nation,—we fought their battles, shared their sorrow,
mingled our blood with theirs, and generation after generation
have pleaded with a headstrong, careless people to despise not
Justice, Mercy, and Truth, lest the nation be smitten with a curse.
Our song, our toil, our cheer, and warning have been given to
this nation in blood-brotherhood. Are not these gifts worth the
giving? Is not this work and striving? Would America have been
America without her Negro people? (Du Bois 1903d, 262–63,
chap. 14, para. 25)
To stand with Du Bois in this vocative position shall we say is to exist on

both sides of the ostensibly “American” form of limit. In this locution by
the narrator of The Souls of Black Folk, one must inhabit the problem of
existence on both sides of the veil, one must traverse “the veil,” and one
must render “the veil,” all in the same movement of thought and critical
discourse. Yet, the movement of Du Bois’s practice would accede to an
order that is for him even more radical. It might, perhaps, be understood
as a certain relation to what has for too long been understood under the
heading of death. One must thus also accept the risk of the illimitable as the
very configuration of that which one might understand as one’s own most
belonging: to accede to the limit of possibility and beyond, perhaps, such
can only arise as one is truly only always other than oneself. In this sense
one only becomes what one is by this carrying forth beyond the limit of
(possible) world. Perhaps the name Negro-Colored-Afro-Afra-Black‒African
American, or even African in this context, is only the name for this tarrying
at the threshold at the limit of the impossible possible world.
Let me open the staging of these thetic formulations of a problematiza-
tion of long-standing within discourse pertaining to matters African American
by way of a direct challenge to contemporary theoretical discourse—and such
is always practical theoretical in its claim—within the various horizons of
discussion of modern history, contemporary globalization, and the thought
of the postcolonial horizon of our historical present and future.
For what is at stake here is an existential sense and an inner theoretical
sense in which no aspect of its possible reference—from which it moves or
toward which it moves—is simple. Stated otherwise, its theoretical sense of
sight, for example, is always at least—and never only—double. Or, to put
Example 5
it in other terms still, I propose that critical thought more assiduously take
resource, implicit or otherwise, in the historically announced plenum for
theoretical reflection that Du Bois formulated under the heading of a kind
of existential sense of “double consciousness,” specifically in its affirmative
yield—a kind of “second sight” within and yet beyond the historicity in
which it is produced. And, further still, such modes of reflexive and reflec-
tive practical-theoretical inhabitation arise as critical engagements of that
dimension of modern historicity that can be metaphorically nominalized
under the heading given by Du Bois as world-historical problem—a global
level “problem of the color line”—if we understand the sense of problem in
his thought to refer to the promulgation of categorical forms of proscription,
no matter the guise or terms under which such is carried out (the religious,
the economic, the so-called racial, the terms of sex, sexual difference, gender,
nationality, citizenship, etc.). In addition, we can accede to this thought if
we also recognize that the term color bespeaks not only problem but also
possibility—the prospect of new forms and ways for groups of humans to
attain or create full realization of historical capacity, or even to open paths
toward the possibility of an horizon of unlimited generation and generosity.
And, on both levels—of “problem” and “color”—let us here, for the sake of
our own historical topos, call it the question of the general necessity and
possibility of the migrant (whether forced or unforced, coerced or uncoerced).
To accede to this thought requires the inhabitation of certain “pro-
nounced parallaxes”—never only one. Or, at least this is a register by which
one might translate Du Bois’s thought of the critical possibilities of “double
consciousness,” or more properly its yield, “second sight,” into vocatives that
contemporary critical discourse might find more resonant to its theoretical
ear than has been the case up to now—not only in the Americas, north and
south, and the Caribbean, or in Europe, but in Asia (remarking Japan as a
nodal reference to the announcement of these reflections), and—especially
on the horizons of what I am nominalizing herein by way of a paleonymic
practice—a certain sense of Africa.
We might usefully proceed toward such a proposed interlocution by
way of an annotation of the recent accession to a thought of the parallax in
certain contemporary critical discourse in and about modern historicity—such
as we find it in the deep and inspiring commitment of the relatively recent
work of Kōjin Karatani placed under the heading of a “trans-critique” (and
also in the various avatars or interlocutions with his formulation of prob-
lem). Karatani remarks in his prefatory that his projection is of and from
Japan but not yet so directly about Japan, for it follows Karl Marx in the
nineteenth-century thinker’s “project that elucidates the nature and limit of

capital’s drive [Trieb]” (Karatani 2003, viii). Yet, as a specific production of
Karatani’s own discourse, his elaboration of the project of a “trans-critique”
attains its theoretical opening for the chance of a renewed thought of trans-
formation within and perhaps beyond capitalism by way of a reference to
the “parallaxes” of reason adduced in the precritical discourse of Immanuel
Kant (but a precritical reflection that, in the epistemic sense, was already
working over the terrain through which the path to critical thought would
later become tractable) (Karatani 2003, viii, 3–4, 30–53).
Yet I propose that Karatani’s initiative might find itself rendered more
generative still by way of an engagement with the formulation of the prob-
lem at stake in Du Bois’s discourse and itinerary of practice. Indeed, such
resource in interlocution may also enable us to allow Du Bois’s thought to
take us toward its own limit and pose a question that would yet remain
beyond such limit as practice.
If this is so—why and how?
In a word, neither proposing nor affirming an accession to a pure
term beyond the movement of double reference, a radicalization of Du Bois’s
thought and practice, in part by way of his own example, would affirm
the maintenance of such double (or redoubled) movement—a movement
of the double—as the very root (if there is such) of critical sense, reflex,
judgment, and practical-theoretical intervention. It would be otherwise than
the traditional sense of ambivalence; it would be ambivalence with an edge,
ambivalence always charged on the bias, of a responsibility for a possible
intervention within historicity.
The thought of parallax from which Karatani takes resource is offered
in the fourth chapter of Kant’s 1766 text Dreams of a Spirit Seer Elucidated
by Dreams of Metaphysics. The formulations of the status of a parallax in a
practice of reason that would be otherwise than naive are produced as the
opening and frame of the concluding chapter of the book as a whole and
thus remarks on the very opening for thought to which Kant had acceded
in the course of that work.
Scales intended by civil law to be a standard measure in trade,

may be shown to be inaccurate if the wares and the weights
are made to change pans. The bias [Parteilichkeit] of the scales
of understanding is revealed by exactly the same strategem
[Kunstgriff], and in philosophical judgements, too, it would
not be possible unless one adopted this strategem, to arrive
Example 7
at a unanimous result [einstimmiges Fazit] by comparing the

different weighings. . . . I formerly used to regard the human
understanding in general merely from the point of view of my
own understanding. Now I put myself in the position of someone
else’s reason which is independent of myself and external to me
[in die Stele einer fremden und äusseren Vernunft], and regard my
judgements, along with their most secret causes, from the point
of view of other people. The comparison of the two observations
yields, it is true, pronounced parallaxes, but it is also the only
method for preventing optical deception, and the only means
of placing the concepts in the true positions which they occupy
relatively to the cognitive faculty of human nature. . . . But the
scales of the understanding are not, after all, wholly impartial.
One of the arms which bears the inscription: Hope for the future,
has a mechanical advantage; and that advantage has the effect
that even weak reasons, when placed on the appropriate side
of the scales, cause speculations, which are in themselves of
greater weight, to rise on the other side. This is the only defect
[Unrichtigkeit], and it is one which I cannot easily eliminate.
Indeed, it is a defect which I cannot even wish to eliminate.
(Kant 1992, 336–37)
I leave aside here any attempt to offer the fulsomeness of my engagement

with Kant’s discourse; and, instead, simply name our recognition of several
principal nodes of theoretical reference for Kant’s later architectonic as
offered by way of this passage. First, Kant’s formulation of the first step, or
proto-step (in terms of his own itinerary), of a critical practice as “to put
myself in the position of someone else’s reason” should acquire a highlight
here in the context of our proposed interlocution. Second, so too should its
implication: “pronounced parallaxes” (which I will translate in a summary
manner here as a shift in the appearance of the object by way of shift in
the reference according to which the subject can address such an objective,
a shifting that then finds no register or generality according to which one
position, a supposed singular might be maintained), a proposition to which
we might diacritically add the sense of hue or color. It is always otherwise
than the supposed singular. And, third, we annotate—in a manner that
we, along with Du Bois, might share with Karatani, Marx, and Kant—that
despite all caution, a certain bias will always have remained an ineluctable
dimension of the relation within the movement of parallaxes, for all forms of
judgment are practical-theoretical: they are concerned to determine, what

must be done, to intervene in the present on behalf of the future.
Perhaps Kant in the critical works sought the resolution of such “pro-
nounced parallaxes” in an attempt to give critical guidance in the negotiation
of the “transcendental illusions” produced as “ideas of pure reason” (ideas
of—whole or limit, perhaps—which have as such no object for intuition,
but appear as necessary for thought—such as I or self, world or cosmos, and
God; to which I would likely propose we add, for example. species and race,
but that is properly a matter of another scene of interlocution) as remarked
in his “Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic” in the Critique of Pure
Reason of 1781, and as practiced in both his turning point essay on tele-
ology and the concept of race of 1788 and the exfoliation of the passage
within the labor of critical thought according to the latter formulation of the
problematic as the Critique of the Power of Judgment of 1790 (Kant 1998,
590–623, A642/B670-A704-B732; Kant 2007; Kant 2000).
The track of Karatani’s engagement with Kant’s formulation here, seems
to suggest that for this contemporary thinker the accession to the “unanimous
result [einstimmiges Fazit]”—as given in the passage quoted above from the
eighteenth-century thinker—would not only mark the opening toward the
transcendental, and make “us face the problem of universality,” but also
bequeath access to judgments of such (Karatani 2003, 46–49).
Yet, if Kant’s or Karatani’s disposition is allowed a reasonable recog-
nition in the recollection that I have given, it can be offered in contradis-
tinction to such a path that having proposed the critical thought of the
transcendental and still proceeding by way of its interminable passage, for
example the always already given critical recognition that no sense is sim-
ple, one must still set afoot or adrift, always again, according to a practice
that would be—to use an old language, as paleonymy—ultra-transcendental:
that the transcendental is not, and can never be, a position; or, it is only
position, always partial and hence nonsimple, and finds its possibility only
by way of that which is otherwise and thereby (that is, as always otherwise)
allows its articulations (Derrida 1976, 60–62ff.). This is to say, if there is
parallax, there can never be only one. And, the unresolvability of parallax
will have always been a remainder of the only fundamental possibility of
imagination, understanding, and hope. The maintenance of such parallax,
as we are elaborating it here, the thought of the double, is precisely the
responsibility of practice as thought.
What meaning does this passage through the references to Kant and
Karatani have for us, or what can such mean, in the horizon of the ensemble
Example 9
of problematics crisscrossing, as some possible impossible whole, the thought

of the future that I am proposing herein?
Let us turn, at this conjunction, and translate this discussion of parallax
in the direction of the thought of Du Bois, leaving aside and open for future
consideration—that of others as well as our own—much remainder. I take
recourse first to Du Bois’s signal thought of “a sense of double consciousness”
that took shape within a certain formation of subjectivation—as a “Negro”
and an “American,” within a certain historicity, the turn to the twentieth
century—and the critical capacity it allows, a kind of “second sight” in that
world, namely, that “American world,” in which it arose.
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton
and Mongolian the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with
a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a
world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only
lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense
of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of
measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in
amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an
American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled
strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged
strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of
the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing
to attain self-conscious manhood, for merge his double self into
a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the
older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America; for
America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would
not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism,
for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.
He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a
Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon
by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed
roughly in his face. (Du Bois 1903d, 3–4, chap. 1 paras. 3–4)
Should we not recognize Du Bois’s formulation on “the meaning of being

black at the dawning of the Twentieth Century,” as he put it in the
“forethought” of his book of The Souls of Black Folk of 1903—a form of
“seeing oneself through the eyes of the other world”—as addressing in
its own manner the horizon of question that Kant broached in his 1766
ruminations on metaphysics (with Europe awash with the heights of the
beneficence arising from a then three-centuries-old Atlantic slave trade, for
example) (Du Bois 1903d, 3–4, chap. 1, paras. 3–4)? And too, should we
not see within the movements of Du Bois’s discourse of a “second sight”—a
form of parallax, or better, a movement of “pronounced parallaxes,” as Kant
put it, but here shaded “darkly as through a veil”—that allowed Du Bois
to open a critical thought not just on an “American world” of the turn to
the last century, but rather on the whole trajectory of modern historicity,
including especially its epistemic gathering, in which a critical production
such as Kant’s (and Marx’s too) could arise, which yielded for Du Bois the
theoretical intervention of his own elaboration across some six subsequent
decades a discourse of a global level “problem of the color line” emerging
over the half-dozen centuries before our own and remaining at stake within
our moment for those yet to come (Du Bois 1903d, 3, 8, chap. 1, paras.
3 and 9; Du Bois 1900; Du Bois 2015d)?
For, indeed, it was this double and redoubled sense of critical per-
spective that allowed Du Bois to think otherwise than an alignment with
a dominant Europe or a strident and precipitative America, and propheti-
cally as it were with regard to Asia as a whole—to nominalize an example,
which would name not only Japan and China, but India, Korea, Indonesia,
the Philippines, Vietnam, and so forth—indexing in this case the massive
attempts by the European powers and the United States at the complete
colonization of the vast majority of the world across the second half of the
nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Indeed, the reference here is to
the colonial and postcolonial global level horizon as some kind of ensemblic
whole. Thus, finally, it was that Du Bois proposed to name the possibility of
an Asian future—which we now remark as a certain sense of an Afro-Asia
to come—for example, as other than that bequeathed to the world by the
“West.” For was it not indeed his sense of the possibility of another world,
a future different than what that “West” had made it in the past, that gave
the bias, the critical edge to Du Bois’s sense of world history astride the
years following the First World War, and before the Second World War
had fully announced itself, when so much of our contemporary sense of
the world historic interest of modern Asia (now definitively remarked in its
implication by its Diasporas) was quite literally being fought out on a global
scale? The neutrality of a certain liberalism—a kind of Kantianism (whether
self-reflexively understood by the thinkers in question or not) if you will—is
not presumed within Du Bois’s practice. Nor can the putative universalism
Example 11
of a certain Marxism be simply granted by his reflection. While remaining

otherwise than a naive realism, according to Du Bois’s practice, there is no
way into and through our sense of historicity than its production of what
is at stake for us here and now—even despite or otherwise than any hope
we maintain about the future.1
For, in this path of reflection, Du Bois’s itinerary of the double, or
a new theoretical sense of critical parallax, the practice of thought does
not arrive at a “unanimous” or common understanding of difference as a
simple formation. Yet, neither is it an account of a mode of “parallelism”
to or within various forms of limit within modernity, nor a contraversion
or “counter” formation of the same; and less still is it a simple “duality.”2
Along with the feints and dissimulations that attend its emergence, its yield
remains as both a problem and a critical resource (two ways of formulating
the same matter)—of existence and thought as practice (Chandler 1993). In
turn, its problematic status, that is, its partiality, is precisely the source of its
generativity. It must always reference the more than one or affirm such as its
futural historicity, which is already at stake in its present as given. And, in
only an apparent paradox, this partiality is precisely its way of acceding to
a sense of possibility (rather than simply a given whole or idea of totality),
which in its reception of the heterogeneity of originary irruption is both
more radical and more fundamental than the long-standing dominant avatars
of freedom and universality. It is both of, but remains always an exorbitance
to, all senses of limit within the given that make it possible. It will thus
have always remained a radical order of name for the general possibility of
the historicity in which and according to which it could be announced.
And, further, for example, by way of theoretical metaphor, Du Bois’s
thought of the double can be understood to announce the irruption of a
certain “pronounced parallax,” which reveals irreversibly, in turn, that within
the very possibility of seeing there is not now, nor has there ever been, any
sustainable way of claiming or maintaining a supposed prior or ultimate order
of simple or pure sight. Or, that is to say, sight can arise only according to
a certain distribution of shading or shadow, hue, and color.
It is here then that we can turn further still, as if by way of an axis,
but in truth more as if by way of the receptive tracking of the movements
of shadow on the sundial, toward the horizon as such, remarking thereby
the inception of our path of reflection, the irruption of the historial under
the heading named African American.
Understood according to a certain historical sense encoded in Du
Bois’s formulation, the African American problematic can be understood
to open on its other side to a whole dimension of historicity, one perhaps

susceptible to a certain inhabitation. It is that dimension that in truth can
be said to open the historical form of the question of the African American.
Du Bois places it under the heading of the “problem of the color line.” A
critical thought of the problem of the color line proposes the terms of an
epistemic desedimentation of historicity, not only of the past, but also of
the present, in such a manner that one can remark the limits of such his-
toricity as yet also outlining the thresholds by which one could reimagine
possibility. It is in this sense that a continual desedimentation of the past
is of fundamental necessity in practical thought. In this sense, a certain
thinking of the problem of the color line might allow a different sense of
world, a different sense of horizon, to arise. It would be one that is dif-
ferent than what has been given in the present. This too, as I have begun
to propose, is the scene of a fundamental epistemological contribution by
Du Bois that has yet to be fully elaborated as a theoretical intervention in
modern thought as critical discourse.
In such a world, another one, different than those which have yet
existed, and specifically one in which “the problem of the color line” has
been rendered obsolete, groups such as the African American, whose originar-
ity necessarily remains at stake in every instance of its promulgation and thus
always in a sense yet to come, might be exemplary for human existence:
not exemplary as the final or absolute example, but rather, exemplary of the
historicity of our time and of the possibility of the making and remaking
of ideals in, or as, the matter of existence in general.
However, it must be remarked that one of the astonishing facts about
the current resurgence in the reading and study of Du Bois’s works is the
absence of any true scholastic account of his formulation and deployment
of the thought of a global “problem of the color line.”3 While it remains
that his most famous words are “the problem of the twentieth century is the
problem of the color line,” this oft-quoted statement has been understood
or used primarily for its apparently prosaic truth or as if it were merely
apocryphal. Thus, the phrase has been primarily used over the decades, if
taken up at all, as a slogan or idiom. It has not been taken up so much
as the name of a fundamental motif in Du Bois’s thought or as a problem
for contemporary thought in general: one that would fundamentally be
epistemological even as it is irreducibly political.
In terms of the discussion of Du Bois’s discourse itself, due, perhaps,
to this same limited effort to think with him on this line, it has often been
deduced or implied that a global perspective arose more or less suddenly
Example 13
for him as an effect of his participation in the Exposition Universelle held at

Paris, and the first international conference called by the name “Pan-African”
in London during the months of June and July in 1900.4 And then others
have operated this logic with reference to many other dates in his later
career, with some mentioning the 1920s as a time when such a perspective
developed, and others proposing that such an event occurred as late as
1945, when Du Bois was in his late seventies. This kind of premise and
such logic has governed much of the interpretation of Du Bois’s thought
with regard to modernity as a whole or as it concerns the global in general
no matter what period of his itinerary has been under discussion. Yet such
a premise does not bear up under scholastic scrutiny and the theorizations
and interpretations deduced by way of it are profoundly misleading for any
attempt to judge the implication of the itinerary of Du Bois’s practice for
contemporary thought. Thus, it should be understood as both a scholastic
paradox and a political conundrum, certainly definitive in the American
and Anglo-European academic discourse, but perhaps decisive in other
geo-epistemic domains by way of the dissemination of such discussion, that
most people—including many Du Bois scholars—know the famous line,
“the problem of the twentieth century . . .” from the reprinting of his 1901
essay “The Freedmen’s Bureau,” as the second chapter of The Souls of Black
Folk, with virtually no idea of the fundamental level of sedimentation that
it has within his thought: (1) that the global perspective adumbrated in that
chapter was developed initially from Du Bois’s attempt to understand the
specific African American situation; (2) that it bespeaks a whole conception
situated at a global level that Du Bois had begun to formulate during the
half-dozen years prior to the publication of his most famous book; and (3)
that it remained an epistemological formulation that he would elaborate on
many registers across his entire career, serving to formulate the theoretical
horizon for the most ambitious works of the later stages of his career, from
Black Reconstruction in 1935, including both Color and Democracy and The
World and Africa from the signal era at the end of the Second World War,
to The Black Flame trilogy from 1955 to 1961 (Du Bois 1976a; Du Bois
1975a; Du Bois 1976d; Du Bois 1976c; Du Bois 1976b; Du Bois 1976e).
It is for this reason that a kind of restatement of the paradoxes
engendered by this mistaken approach can perhaps underscore the still
timely pertinence of a clarification of the issue at hand. So, on the one
hand, those who know of the line just quoted from the second chapter
of The Souls of Black Folk usually have a quite limited sense of its global
framing in Du Bois’s thought; or, if they do gesture toward such a frame,
they have little or no grip on the depth of the conception involved. But,
on the other hand, those who rhetorically grasp this line as a way to link
Du Bois’s thought to a global context in a general sense, tend to do it by
using it as a kind of weapon, under the authority of his name, against what
they mistakenly think or opportunistically characterize as a kind of paro-
chialism in the discourse of African Americans in the United States, or the
apparent historic dominance of such a topic in discussions of the question
of the African Diaspora or the problem of race in a global context.5 Yet the
pertinence of such announced interventions might at best be their rendering
legible matters of position and authority in our contemporary discursive and
institutional scene. For beyond any matter of polemics, it remains that the
most troublesome aspect of readings of Du Bois that would conscript his
discourse primarily for affirming our own ideas about the truth of modern
global history is that it makes it very difficult if not impossible to access
and to judge, first on the terms of Du Bois’s own declarations, what he
thought he was saying.
If one undertakes such an examination, it renders a quite legible track
that shows Du Bois was first led to this global frame precisely by trying
to think the African American situation in the United States in the most
fundamental and general manner possible. That he was, in this sense, first
solicited by the specific ground of his own emergence articulates a general
protocol of a commitment to thinking immanence that one disavows at one’s
own epistemic peril. That he sought to situate such immanence in relation
to a passage of thought to the most general itself solicits and radicalizes
this thought of the specific and the immanent. In an empirical sense this
meant that he was led to a global frame precisely by way of this preoccupa-
tion with the situation of African Americans in the United States and not
despite it. Yet, in a theoretical sense, Du Bois was simultaneously insisting
that the African American situation could only be understood as part of a
global horizon and that global modernity could only be understood if one
recognized the constitutive status for the making of modern world history
as a whole of the historical process by which this group was announced
in history.6 The African American situation was a global one for Du Bois.
And, in this way, at a ground level of historicity, shall we say, it was an
exemplary example of a global problematic.7
Let me briefly restage here a scholastic question that I believe suggests
in succinct manner what is at issue. What if the apparently most local and
parochial chapters of The Souls of Black Folk, if situated, for example, in
relation to the labor of thought presented in the essay “The Present Out-
Example 15
look for the Dark Races of Mankind,” dating from December 1899, can be
rendered as profoundly marked by a global perspective (Du Bois 1900; Du
Bois 2015d)? Yet what if it is also the case that it therefore becomes clear
that the means to the development of such a perspective for Du Bois, that
of a certain sense of global modernity, was through and through by way of
his concern with the only apparently parochial or relatively local situation
of the African American in the United States? I suggest that this double
remarking can come into profound relief by such juxtaposition. Thus, it is
of some import that “The Present Outlook for the Dark Races of Mankind,”
which was first presented in public in December 1899 as the presidential
address at the third annual meeting of the American Negro Academy, bears
at most an extremely limited citation in the contemporary literature and in
an essential sense remains unread in our time. It remains that up to now
there is no contemporary approach to Du Bois’s work that has accomplished
such an interpretive positioning.
Yet this essay is one of Du Bois’s most important: for it is in fact the
first place where he actually enunciates his most famous statement—the
problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line—accord-
ing to an achieved principle of formulation and clarified epistemological
frame. This essay is certainly as important as “The Conservation of Races,”
an essay that has rightly spawned a small cottage industry on both sides
of the Atlantic over the course of the past generation. Thus, it is only an
apparent paradox that Du Bois’s essays on the African American situation
in the United States, from the time just after the completion of his doctoral
study in 1895 to the years immediately following the publication of The
Souls of Black Folk in 1903, and especially including the chapters of the
latter text that to a superficial reading would appear most particularistic; for
example, those on the “Freedmen’s Bureau” or on the “relations of Black
and White Americans in the South,” acquire their most powerful legibility
and theoretical importance, then or now, only when seen as the very path
for Du Bois’s development of an interpretation of modernity in general,
certainly of America as a distinctive scene of its devolution, but also of a
global or worldwide historical conjuncture understood from the trajectory
of human history as a whole. For taken as a whole singular enunciation,
even as it is threaded with multiple motivations, claims, and levels of utter-
ance, Du Bois’s discourse at the turn of the twentieth century bespeaks a
powerful sense of the way that the question of the African American is a
question about the possibilities of a global modernity in general. Such an
understanding should play a large role in getting rid of an often understated
but widely held sense that the study of African Americans in the United
States is a parochial or naively nationalistic discussion, and so forth. It can
also go far in showing that in fact the problem of the Negro in America has
long been understood within the most astute configurations of the African
American intellectual community in the United States as a fundamental part
of the question of colonialism and its aftermath, that the differentiation of
the two discourses, for example, one concerned with “African American”
matters and another concerned with “the colonial” in general in contem-
porary academic discussions in the Americas and in Europe, but especially
in the United States, is an instituted one of recent and superficial lineage.
We can underscore, that Du Bois, for example, from the very inception
of his itinerary had announced a conception of a thought of the African
American in which the premise and implication of this common historicity
was the very terms of enunciation.
In the context of contemporary discussions about the aftermath of
colonialism, or postcolonial discourse of one kind or another, or debates
about globalization, Du Bois’s early negotiation of the epistemological para-
doxes involved in conceptualizing the modern history of imperialism, slavery,
and colonialism in a way that accounts for its worldwide provenance and
does not simply reproduce a self-congratulatory narrative of the making of
the West, along with his prophetic thematization of the way in which the
question of historical difference (for which we have no good names—such
as ethnicity, race, nationality, culture, etc.) among groups of people would
come to dominate future discussions of politics and authority in general
on a global level in the twentieth century and beyond, bear renewed and
somewhat paradoxical force (Chandler 2006b; Chandler 2007). Thus, the
current discussion of Du Bois must be rearticulated such that it may become
possible to thoroughly think through the implications for contemporary
thought of his understanding of the African American situation as part of
a worldwide problematic, whether we call it modernity or postmodernity,
the persistence of colonialism, or postcolonialism, a conflict of civilizations,
or simply globalization or mondialisation, or something else altogether.
On such a path of critical thought, the African American example—
by way of Du Bois’s elaboration of its configuration in the movement of
an always at least and never-only double organization of heading—might
appear as precisely a resource in a new thought of contemporary historicity.
Second, we might say, to continue our elaboration on the track of this
order of example, Du Bois was concerned with the question of Africa—certainly
through and by way of and always in the existence of those peoples of the
Example 17
continent known by this name—with regard to its implication for how one
might think of possibility in human history on a global scale. Such question
came to him initially by way of his concern with the African American
question. The two were for him inseparably interwoven. This was in the first
temporal instance by way of the history of the slave trade stemming from
the fifteenth century. It was also by way of the promulgation of an imperial
colonialism by European states on the African continent during the latter
half of the nineteenth century. Yet, it must be emphasized here, in a way
that contravenes the too common formulation of question in contemporary
discussions that have proceeded under the heading of the postcolonial for
the past generation or so, that from within the horizon of the twenty-first
century one can only get to the problem of the global level of modern
colonialism by way of a first coming to terms with or passing through the
history of modern systems of enslavement announced across the Atlantic
and in the Americas. This earlier moment then is the incipient reference for
Du Bois’s theorization of Africa as a problematic of his present. The latter
moment is the very time of Du Bois’s first formation as a thinker, thereby
naming both what is at stake for him and the practical nominal presentation
of historicity that organizes the directions of the initial steps of his inquiry.
However, within his engagement with these two specific references, given
by time and place, Du Bois’s concern with the historial character of Africa
was general and fundamental. As such, it can be said that its futural status
remained for him the question of the future of the whole of the world.
His question, announced already in the 1890s at the very beginning of his
itinerary and persisting throughout all stages of his work, even right to the
end, was about the place of Africa in world history, that is, in the historicity
of world. Three tracks might be remarked: the place of ancient Egypt in
historicity, both its relation to historial groups in other parts of the continent
and its relation to the history of human civilization in a general or global
sense; the original character of historical practice among groups throughout
the continent; and the possible futures for the new forms of historical entity
that had already become definitive, or would shortly become so, especially
political entities, across the African continent. The place of a “pan-African”
proclamation for Du Bois then turns on the question of how to inhabit an
historically given situation: that the devolution of modernity has been in its
fundamental organization by way of the production of something that he
called, from early on in his writings, “the Negro problems.” Thus, Du Bois’s
abiding concern for a putative Africa was for the production of a collective
subject (political or legal, economic, and ideological or “cultural”) that
could respond to this historic denegation, transform it, and move beyond
its horizon to an alliance with the most far reaching possibilities of human
freedom as such had emerged in the modern epoch.
It should be remarked here, for it has yet to be generally understood,
that Du Bois’s concern with Africa is the place of a major intervention (like
so much else in his itinerary): the resolute proposition of the principle of
elucidating and interpreting the historical form or organization of groups
on the African continent as an indication of an original historicity as such.
This is the root narrative movement of this 1915 text, The Negro (Du Bois
1975d). I consider it in an epistemic sense the pioneering statement of a
possible African studies in the discourses of the United States and for dis-
courses that would try to think the Continent and its Diaspora together,
even if it was not programmatic in register and even if today it still remains
unrecognized as such in general.8 It is perhaps this “pan-Africanism” that
later academic Africanist discourse thought it should disavow in the name
of a supposedly more impartial perspective. The epistemic bearing of Du
Bois’s attempt remains as pertinent today as it was in 1915. This bearing is
organized along two inextricably interwoven lines of implication: first, that
the specific forms of inhabitation and practice by groups of sub-Saharan
Africa are of basic implication for the interpretation of the meaning of
human practice in the modern era in general; second, that given its distinct
role in the making of the modern world systems of power—political and
economic—in which its exploitation could be proposed as an irreducibly
decisive and historically determining means of the passage to the modern
in the West, its historically given status stands as a judgment of the same
and an arbiter of futural limit for the world in general. The great surge in
the excavation and elaboration of the symbolic that has been definitive in
the study of the continent since the 1960s, building on premises that were
institutionalized in the 1930s and 1940s in the United States, was already
proposed by Du Bois in his early text. And while Du Bois had already
disavowed any biological determinism to the concept of race in his 1897
text “The Conservation of Races,” in the 1915 text he explicitly declared the
impertinence of such putative determination for conceptualizing something
called “the Negro” in a global sense as well as for thinking the relation of
Africa and “its” historic Diaspora. The thought of a “black Atlantic” or a
horizon of “Africana” as an epistemic problematization is already assayed in
his discourse at the advent of the First World War. As such, Du Bois had
broached the very question that would be another key term in the formula-
tion of both an academic African studies and an academic African Diasporic
Example 19
studies from the 1930s forward and has since remained a perennial—even
if at times submerged—nexus of question.
With all of this in mind we can excerpt a passage from Du Bois’s
concluding words in his 1915 text, his first sustained discussion of Africa,
and take note of that poignant irony that is the very lacing by which so
much of his writing is sustained. It points us toward a radical thought by
which the name of “Africa” stands not as an indication of a closed and
primordial figure in the history of the modern world, whether such might
be understood as a good thing (the Africa of a reactionary pan-Africanism)
or bad thing (the Africa of an unjustifiably presumptive European philos-
ophy), but as the scene by which the passage of historial possibility might
be tracked and perhaps announced.
There is slowly arising not only a curiously, strong brotherhood

of Negro blood throughout the world, but the common cause of
the darker races against the intolerable assumptions and insults
of Europeans has already found expression. Most men in this
world are colored. A belief in humanity means a belief in colored
men. The future world will, in all reasonable probability, be what
colored men make it. (Du Bois 1975d, 146)
This apparently prosaic proposition by Du Bois mobilizes an ensemble of

highly overdetermined terms in the first sentence of its statement, appearing
in one register of its enunciation to thereby reaffirm them. Nonetheless, it
can be understood to produce an ironic displacement of their pertinence. For
the second, third, and fourth sentences of the passage take up the apparent
nominal limit as it is announced in the terms of the historical present—the
figure of the “colored”—and affirms it as the name of a possibility that would
extend in every sense—spatial and temporal—beyond such limit. Thus, his
reinscription of the terms of historical limit as they were announced in
his historical present sustains an ironic affirmation which would precisely
mark as relative such limits and point toward an exorbitance within that
very historicity. The name of Africa, then, may well be understood therein
to remain as the paleonymic inscription for such possibility beyond the
limit of world.
Third, in a manner that we have already begun to remark by way of
reference to the African American example in the United States and the
question of the African example, Du Bois was concerned with a global
horizon to which he would give many names across his long life (some that
we might affirm today and others that we would most likely reject), such as
“the dark races of mankind” in 1900 or “worlds of color” in 1925 and again
in 1961 or the “dark colonized laborers of the world” in 1944. Elucidating
this horizon, characterizing its historicity, and effecting a transformation of
the conditions of its emergence and persistence—the general form of mod-
ern colonialism and its aftermath—might well be taken as the most general
political frame of Du Bois’s life work. The paramount question is: what might
these massed millions, now billions, contribute to the making of possibilities for
the future of human existence in a global sense if they were free to cultivate their
most specific and originary character to its fullest. (And such character would
have no determination that could be understood simply on the basis of an
a priori, such as the biological premise of the concept of race.) It appears
as an achieved epistemological focus as early as December 1899, on the
occasion of his first presentation of the text, “The Present Outlook for the
Dark Races of Mankind,” in the form of a public lecture (Du Bois 1900).
It can then be tracked across his entire career and registered at every level
of his discourse: for example, in summary restatement as a declaration in
“The Color Line Belts the World” (1906) (Du Bois 1906a); as the global
frame that is especially resounded in the last two chapters of John Brown
(1909) (Du Bois 1973a) and which later resonates as the drone throughout
that complicated evening raga that is Black Reconstruction (1935) (Du Bois
1976a); as the guiding interpretive principle of “The African Roots of War”
(1915) (Du Bois 1915; Du Bois 1982a), as well as Darkwater (1920) (Du
Bois 1975b) and “Worlds of Color” (1925) (Du Bois 1982f ); as the operative
question at stake in the narrative of Dark Princess (1928) (Du Bois 1974a);
as the governing thought in the unpublished epistolary narrative “A World
Search for Democracy” (1937) (Du Bois 1980d), and in the epistemological
coda for it that is Color and Democracy (1945) (Du Bois 1975a); and as the
telic problematic of the Black Flame Trilogy (1957‒1961), especially its last
volume Worlds of Color (1961) (Du Bois 1976c; Du Bois 1976b; Du Bois
1976e). This is the track of a whole possible investigation into the thought
and contributions of Du Bois at a level of profundity that has not yet been
attempted. This order of attention would mean that both the object, the
“thought of Du Bois,” and the required subject of inquiry would doubtless
exceed the terms of a discourse signed by one author or encoded in one
textual statement. It should be the operative horizon by which Du Bois’s
thought is reengaged critically and articulated as a an essential reference
within the scene of a most contemporary and ongoing global-level discussion.
Example 21
Most profoundly here a certain form of hyperbolic renarrativization of

the world historical would be the most fundamental demand. Is this not the
practice of that mischievously erudite novel of the Harlem Renaissance—Dark
Princess—to take but one example? World history is announced therein on
the subterranean orders of existence as they have been canonically given
in the figure of the West as the devolution of modern history. Thus, in
the narratives of this text, the historicity of the present becomes nameable
according to an ensemble of axes and temporalities that are not according to
either the line or the point. In one sense, they displace topical orientation—
underground there is no absolutely given direction as such. In another, they
extend and interweave relation according to temporal rhythms that recognize
the present only under the heading of its possible dissolution—something
like the always multiple movement of the waves of the ocean. Such are the
implication of the scenes of renarrativization set afoot in this novel: the
interlocutions among “the council of the darker races of mankind” in its
opening scenes; the “back rooms”—whether of the bar or the train—that
provide the scenes for the development of an insurrectionary movement of
the Negro American; in the meditations that occur in the mind’s eye of our
would-be hero as he serves in the excavation of an underground railroad that
will go nowhere; or, in the configured imagination of the two mothers who
yield the figure of a narratable history of a global south coming by way of
a joining of a certain North American “south” across the “southernmost”
landforms of the Americas and of Africa, and across the Atlantic and Indian
oceans, to “South” Asia and thence to Asia and beyond to the “islands of
the [other] sea.” Such narration has to announce the possible production
of the very epistemic horizon that it would proclaim as the terms of its
authorization: this is a performative historiography that would extend itself
beyond the temporalities and the spaces of the given understanding of
historial possibility. Such is the burden and the task of the historiographic
voice proposed in this narrative. It is perhaps no wonder that its demands
remain at stake in our own time of interlocution.9
Fourth, it may surprise many to imagine Du Bois, the Pan-Africanist,
as a profound thinker of the question of the historicity of Europe. Yet, it is
not too much to propose that he is perhaps the most unread or underread
of the major thinkers of the twentieth century on the historial figure of
Europe.10 For Du Bois, as is well enough known, Europe was reflexively at
issue at the autobiographical level already from the early 1890s. What has
yet to be rendered clearly is that Europe is announced as a philosophical
problematic in his thought from the late 1890s onward: such is evident in
two lectures that remained unpublished during his lifetime, “The Art and Art
Galleries of Modern Europe” (ca. 1896) (Du Bois 1985a) and “The Spirit
of Modern Europe” (ca. 1900) (Du Bois 1985b), as well as its articulation
as a problem and example in “The Present Outlook for the Dark Races
of Mankind” (1899), one of his most important essays, as I have already
remarked and will annotate further below (Du Bois 1900; Du Bois 2015d).
From this time through to the end of his career, this order of interrogation
and reflection about Europe forms a fundamental line of sedimentation in
Du Bois’s thought, especially just before, during, and after, the First World
War (Du Bois 1910; Du Bois 1915; Du Bois 1917; Du Bois 1975b). Start-
ing from the historically given role of Europe in modern world history, the
question of its historial status appears in every major aspect of Du Bois’s
attempts to think through the historicity of modernity. Certainly this is true
everywhere that he discusses colonialism and the question of “the darker
world” in the future; thus each of the texts mentioned above on this theme
are pertinent here. Yet what is not so readily recognized is how in each of
his major engagements with Africa, there is an abiding examination and
critique of Europe; this is due to the deep mutually constituting relation, as
Du Bois understands it, of these two historical entities as each are announced
in modern history. Thus it is that the first three chapters of The World and
Africa (1947), for example, are an acute questioning of the tenability of the
legacies of Europe for the future as they stand just after the Second World
War and at the midpoint of the century in which the global problem was
“the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men” (Du Bois 1976d).
And, for example, Du Bois’s last major published extended narrative, the
last volume of the Black Flame trilogy, Worlds of Color maintains this line
as a major passage. The novel opens with the protagonist embarking on a
worldwide tour, much as Du Bois had done in 1936, to inquire about the
future of democracy in the world as a whole. The first stop is Europe where
a sustained and ironic discussion recurs across the national historical figures
of Western Europe about their respective places, as well as that of the “conti-
nent” as a whole, in such a future. In the background always is the question
of how to situate Europe’s past and present exploitation of the continent of
Africa in world historical terms. Another superb example of this approach in
Du Bois’s thought is one of his last published texts, “Africa and the French
Revolution,” dating from July 1961.11 What must be underscored here is the
transformation in his thought about the status of Europe with regard to the
terms of historicization. If at 1900 he was hopeful that Europe might still
Example 23
lead the way to a new horizon of human freedom, then an understanding

of the rhythm of its unfolding was the essential reference for the future. And
then at 1920, after the First World War, he was shocked and aghast but
still hopeful about Europe; thus, a certain dialogue or appeal to Europe to
affirm its original possibility as rooted in a global historial movement and
to thus also affirm a recognition of historial possibility among the “dark
races” of the world, remained fundamental. However, by the end of the
Second World War, as he saw it, given the deep reaction still determining
Europe’s sense of its place in a world historical context, Du Bois felt that it
was necessary to understand the historial status of this figure according to
fundamentally different premises. His historiographical syntax now proposed
a fundamentally different rhythm of concatenation. One can recognize such
by the fact that in 1945 the proposition of a certain renarrativization of
the internal historicity of Europe, although already announced in his work
as early as the 1890s and persisting as a central subterranean fault or ore
line throughout his career, now emerged into a distinctive concatenation
and order of relief and the problem of addressing its implication took on a
profoundly urgent status. Without having given up on an affirmation of the
best possibilities bequeathed by Europe to global civilization, the world, as
such, whatever that might be, Du Bois came to propose, by the late 1950s,
ought to look elsewhere than Europe for a historial example in the decades
and perhaps centuries to come. A principal reason was Europe’s continuing
affirmation of the premises of a putative global “color line,” even if at times
such persistence occurred underneath all manner of explicit disavowals.
An instructive question for the history of thought can thus be posed
as the joining of the autobiographical and the historiographical: what if a
certain “Europe” to come might imagine that one W. E. B. Du Bois—Negro,
African, Afro-Caribbean, African American, Black, American, European
American, White, European, and so on—is one of its most distinguished
practitioners of thought from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? If so,
then might not his demand for a rethinking of its horizon lend itself to a
certain radicalization of its historial possibility? Might not then the indefat-
igable commitment to thinking beyond the limit of world that is registered
at the most radical levels of his discourse be an exemplary example for the
proposition of such possibility? It is in this sense that one can wonder if
what has been proposed as a question for Europe at the inception of the
current century, may yet be recognized as already formulated and in these
profound terms under the heading of “the problem of the color-line” at the
inception of the last one (Du Bois 1900; Du Bois 2015d)?
Who counts, can be given an account, or can be given, as European?

Who, or what, then, (is) Europe?
Finally, in this adumbration, it must be said that for Du Bois, Asia was
not simply one example among others. The most important aspect of this
historical domain for Du Bois was that its major bearing for world history
in the modern epoch—in the planetary sense—remained yet to come. Let
us note first that its boundaries for him were not fixed. It would include,
certainly, what would have been called the “Far East,” from the standpoint
of America, such as Japan, China, Korea, and Southeast Asia (Taiwan, the
Philippines, Indonesia, etc.); but also in his variegated discussions of “Russia,”
the latter remains ambiguously at the limit of both East and West, both
geographically and as an historical entity (and one has the sense that he
hoped it would in the future affirm its relation to a new Asia as definitive of
its sense of possibility). And what he called “India” was a fundamental part
of this historial profile and for him the definitive source of the great ancient
codification of the thought of generosity in naming the possibility of a human
habitation of spirit, a root that he maintained could still play a fundamental
and decisive role in a world transformation of values (a sense that is most
spectacularly displayed in Dark Princess (Du Bois 1974a), his aforementioned
1928 utopian novel, and in his deep affirmation of two major figures of
twentieth-century India, Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi [and
one notes that Du Bois called for an African American Gandhi during the
1940s more than a decade before Martin Luther King Jr. appeared on the
scene]). And then, the countries of “Eastern” Europe were also potentially
part of this domain, especially Romania and Turkey, along with the Baltic
states (perhaps paradoxically for some), on the one hand, and the historic
peoples of Central Asia, on the other. (In his posthumous Autobiography,
he included a separate chapter on countries of this region—marking them
out as somewhat distinct from a putative Europe—wherein, he put them
in the “pawned peoples” [Du Bois 1968, 22–28].) For Du Bois, at the
present of his life course, shall we say, the region as a whole had yet to
offer the definitive modern form of its answer to the complex question of
the relation of its past to its future in the reorganization of its historicity
that was fundamentally afoot from the nineteenth century forward. For
him, “Asia’s” situation made it not impossible that it could propose a path
through the twentieth century and beyond—especially on the track of “the
relation of the lighter to the dark races of men in Asia, and Africa, and
the islands of the sea”—that would be other, perhaps, than that which
has been practiced by Europe (and America would be included in this
Example 25
nominalization here) since the early centuries of the modern epoch. It was
along this track that Du Bois early on, already before the turn of the cen-
tury, announced a profound affirmation of the historial possibility that he
thought Japan might propose as it at appeared at the edge of the twentieth
century independent of European or American imperial colonial authority.
It was an affirmation that he would never relinquish, even over the course
of and in the aftermath of the tragedies of Japanese imperialism in Asia, for
example, its colonization of Korea and parts of China, notably Manchuria,
along with its ongoing colonial subsumption of the Ryūkyū islands (now
known as Okinawa in general), and the massacre at Nanking in China in
1937 just after his first visit to the region in late 1936, and through the
deep contradictions that its fascist alliance with Hitler and Mussolini in the
Second World War posed for his hope. And, then from a similar disposition,
after the inception of the revolution in China, following the Second World
War, his unhopeful hopefulness for this country during the first quarter of
the twentieth century found a source of renewal and transformation, and
he affirmed what he imagined from that time through to the end of his life
was the form of the proposition of an alternative path to true democracy.
Across the maintenance of his affirmation for these two “colossi” of Asia
(that is, China and Japan) as he had called them in the early 1930s, what
bears sustained meditation is a certain paradoxical reciprocity of premise and
hope in his understanding of Asia as a certain whole—that is as the name
of a problem: (1) that “progress” in the liberation of humankind entails a
“cost,” including the mistakes of leadership, and that from such a position, for
him, the Western nations and states of his present had no basis to censure,
to pass judgment on, those of the East in their failures and limits, given
the former’s own imperial past and present, unless they were to renounce
hope in their own commitment to the eventual realization of fundamental
democracy; while (2) these two countries, Japan and China, along with
other countries of the region whose profile on a regional and global level
astride the twentieth century might appear smaller in the political sense
(but a situation that did not necessarily translate, for him, as suggesting
that they were less rich in the implication of their internal historicity on a
global level), had the capacity if pursued by way of genuine democratically
derived internal leadership to offer a future world something other than what
had yet been seen, especially in the modern epoch dominated in its latest
centuries by the rise of the modern imperialism of Europe and America. In
principle, it can be said, Du Bois felt no apology for the historical limits
of these two historial figures, whose possibilities he had affirmed. For, it
might be said that what is at stake in their present remains not so much
or simply in the form of the future as an ideal yet to be properly glimpsed
but the immanent struggle with historicity as it is announced in existence.
Du Bois continued to hope that Japan and China, for example, and Asia
in general, would develop a genuinely democratic internal organization of
economy and resource such that it would forego the imperial imperative
endemic to all past forms of a global level organization of relation in the
modern context. Thus, in their realization of the possibilities of fundamental
internal democracy they might affirm a new sense of what such could actu-
ally become beyond the examples that had as yet been offered in the West.
A persisting paradox of Du Bois’s thought of global imperialism must
be underscored here. It is a conundrum within his itinerary of which we
can be justly critical on the basis of premises that we can recognize within
the fundament of Du Bois’s own discourse and practice in thought. We can
enter the discussion on the terms of Du Bois’s affirmation of the outcome
of the Japanese-Russian war of 1904‒1905. (And, we should note that he
followed its progress far more closely than he did the 1904‒1905 Russian
Revolution, a fact that he would obliquely qualify throughout the remainder
of his itinerary.) Yet the matter is distinctly revelatory of the relation between
the legible political order of possibility and its epistemic dimensions. (1)
While Du Bois was well aware that both Russia and Japan were seeking to
establish an imperial domination over Korea in this instance, in a manner
that he would retain, he consistently overlooked the full destructive character
of Japan’s imperial ambition and practice in order to affirm the possibility
that it might eventually serve as a limitation for the imperial projects of
Europe, especially Great Britain, and the United States, in Asia. Thus, Du
Bois’s desire, we might say, to mark a limit to European and Euro-American
imperial domination at the turn of the twentieth century is one of the
complicated sources of his ambivalent gestures in this domain. From the
temporal standpoint of the opening years of the twenty-first century, the
unwritten thematic history of both when and how from one turn of the
century to the next the national profile of Japan took on the characteristic
features of a certain “whiteness” or “Europeanness,” not to say a certain
“Americanness,” in the context of a global scenography, is of considerable
bearing here, notwithstanding that it should remain in question and at stake
just what any of such so-called proper names might mean. (2) In addition,
on a broader plane, the epistemic, Du Bois understood historical change
as entailing “cost.” And often, according to each level of historical analysis,
the question as to whether such change might be understood as “progress”
Example 27
or an ultimate good would remain open or susceptible to only an ambiv-

alent answer for him. Quite obviously, for those who are familiar with his
discourse, this did not mean that Du Bois was incapable of distinct and
decisive historical judgment. On the contrary, for the conundrum persists
on another level of generality. A handful of examples can be adduced here.
It is the sort of question with which he closes the poignant essay “Of the
Meaning of Progress,” in The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches of
1903 (Du Bois 1903a). It is likewise for the closing two chapters of his
biography John Brown of 1909 (Du Bois 1973a). Or, one finds it as a
leitmotif running through the novel Dark Princess: A Romance from 1928
(Du Bois 1974a). And, it can be remarked, as a counterpoint to a tempo-
ral focus on the turn of the century, that such a question remains as an
undergirding interrogation in the essay Color and Democracy: Colonies and
Peace from 1945 (Du Bois 1975a), serving as a limit question for testing
the arguments of those from Europe and America that would maintain
the benevolence of colonial protectorates and a European and American
domination of institutions of global governance following the Second World
War. Then, in The Black Flame trilogy (written during the first half of the
1950s, but published across the last years of the decade), especially in its
final installment, Worlds of Color (Du Bois 1976e; Du Bois 1957–61), this
horizon of judgment can be shown to serve as the very palimpsest on which
the narrative unfolds. (3) And, finally, this paradox in Du Bois’s thought is
rooted in the historial soil of a much larger problematic, one that extends
far beyond his discourse, to which the essay “The Present Outlook for the
Dark Races of Mankind” from the turn of the century already pointed:
namely, the complicated relation between concepts and histories of “race”
and “nation” in the different parts of the world, one involving the history
of science and philosophy in Europe and America in its relation to practices
of distinction or institutions organized by something called race, on the one
hand, and a history informed by the complicated historial profiles of China
and India across the differential formations of identity in the Indian Ocean
or Pacific regions, especially in religion, whether linked to a state or not,
along with a powerful discourse of “national” singularity in Japan, on the
other. At stake in each of the latter instances would be the question of the
singularity or justification of those who would claim the authority to rule.
And, then the extent to which the discourse of science has played its own
role in the promulgation of a discourse of race and might overlay, displace,
or recuperate such antecedent presumptions since the eighteenth century
remains a crucial horizon for research: one that is primarily yet to acquire
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DU RÔLE

DES COUPS DE BÂTON DANS LES RELATIONS SOCIALES ET,
EN PARTICULIER, DANS L'HISTOIRE LITTÉRAIRE ***
DU ROLE
DES
COUPS DE BATON
DANS LES RELATIONS
SOCIALES
ET, EN PARTICULIER,
DANS L’HISTOIRE LITTÉRAIRE
PAR
VICTOR FOURNEL
PARIS
A. DELAHAYS, LIBRAIRE-ÉDITEUR
RUE VOLTAIRE, 4-6
1858
PARIS. — TYP. SIMON RAÇON ET Cie, RUE D’ERFURTH, 1.
DU ROLE
DES
COUPS DE BATON
DANS LES RELATIONS SOCIALES
ET, EN PARTICULIER,
DANS L’HISTOIRE LITTÉRAIRE
Le sujet que nous nous proposons de traiter ici pourrait fournir

aisément la matière d’un gros livre ; mais nous préférons, par égard
pour les gens de lettres du temps passé, et par ménagement pour le
lecteur, le renfermer dans des proportions plus restreintes. Même en
élaguant tout ce qui dépasserait les bornes d’un modeste in-32, il
nous restera assez de faits encore (trop peut-être) pour justifier
amplement notre titre.
Et qu’on ne croie pas que ce soit là un simple thème d’érudition,
un prétexte à recherches plus ou moins amusantes, sans utilité et
sans enseignement : ce n’est point ainsi que nous l’avons compris. A
nos yeux, il y a, dans la réponse à la question que nous nous
sommes posée, un des chapitres les plus instructifs de l’histoire
littéraire, ainsi l’un des plus glorieux, en somme, pour les écrivains
d’aujourd’hui, puisque, en les faisant rougir du passé, il leur permet
de s’enorgueillir du présent.
Ce petit livre eût pu s’intituler aussi bien, n’eût été la peur de
l’emphase : Histoire de la condition sociale des gens de lettres, de
leur abaissement, et de leur émancipation progressive. En même
temps qu’il montrera de quel point ils sont partis, il permettra de
mesurer nettement la route parcourue par eux ; il rappellera, à ceux
qui les oublient trop, les progrès de la littérature elle-même, en
rappelant ceux des littérateurs, — c’est-à-dire, à défaut de chefs-
d’œuvre comparables à ceux du passé, l’élévation générale du
niveau des intelligences, et le respect croissant des choses de
l’esprit, se traduisant par le respect de leurs interprètes.
Sans autre introduction, qu’on nous permette d’entrer tout de
suite en matière.
I
Nous ne remonterons pas plus haut que le dix-septième siècle :

c’est de cette époque seulement que date, à proprement parler,
l’homme de lettres en France, et que la lumière se fait, grâce aux
ana et aux biographies, dans les moindres recoins de l’histoire
littéraire. Auparavant, l’écrivain existe plutôt à l’état individuel qu’à
l’état collectif, et les vies ne se révèlent guère que par les œuvres. Il
est fort probable sans doute que des poëtes comme Gringore, Villon
surtout, peut-être même Clément Marot, que maint et maint
troubadour ou trouvère, maint enfant sans souci ou clerc de la
basoche, durent, en plus d’une circonstance, faire connaissance
avec le bâton, ou quelque chose d’approchant ; mais l’absence de
documents particuliers ne nous permet pas de recherches suivies
sur ce grave sujet, et nous en sommes réduits, dans la plupart des
cas, à de simples conjectures, qui ne suffisent point en pareille
matière.
Un des premiers noms qui ouvrent le siècle, et celui qui ouvrira
en même temps cette histoire, c’est Alexandre Hardy, — ce
Shakspeare, moins le génie, comme on l’a justement surnommé, —
l’homme qui mérita, avant Corneille, le titre de fondateur de notre
théâtre. On sait que Hardy s’était mis à la solde d’une troupe de
comédiens, qu’il suivait dans leurs pérégrinations vagabondes, pour
alimenter le répertoire, en fabricant les pièces dont ils avaient
besoin : le Roquebrune du Roman comique de Scarron n’est donc
point, comme on pourrait croire, une création de pure fantaisie, et ce
n’est pas seulement au Viage entretenido de Rojas, qui lui a servi
d’inspiration première, que notre cul-de-jatte a emprunté l’idée de ce
pauvre poëte traîné à la remorque par une troupe ambulante. Le rôle
de souffre-douleur qu’il fait jouer à cet Apollon grotesque, turlupiné
par la Rancune, et servant de plastron à tous ses camarades,
n’appartient pas moins, par malheur, à la réalité. Sur ce point même,
le roman n’a pas été si loin que l’histoire : un seul trait, détaché de la
vie de Hardy, le prototype de Roquebrune, va le prouver
suffisamment.
« C’étoit un jour que les comédiens ne jouoient point, raconte
Tristan l’Hermite, dans son Page disgracié, mais ils ne pouvoient
toutefois l’appeler de repos : il y avoit un si grand tumulte entre tous
ces débauchés, qu’on ne s’y pouvoit entendre. Ils étoient huit ou dix
sous une treille, en leur jardin, qui portoient par la tête et par les
pieds un jeune homme enveloppé dans une robe de chambre : ses
pantoufles avoient été semées, avec son bonnet de nuit, dans tous
les carrés du jardin, et la huée étoit si grande que l’on faisoit autour
de lui, que j’en fus tout épouvanté. Le patient n’étoit pas sans
impatience, comme il témoignoit par les injures qu’il leur disoit d’un
ton de voix fort plaisant, sur quoi ses persécuteurs faisoient de
grands éclats de rire. Enfin je demandai, à un de ceux qui étoient
des moins occupés, que vouloit dire ce spectacle et qu’avoit fait cet
homme qu’on traitoit ainsi. Il me répondit que c’étoit un poëte qui
étoit à leurs gages, et qui ne vouloit pas jouer à la boule, à cause
qu’il étoit en sa veine de faire des vers ; enfin, qu’ils avoient résolu
de l’y contraindre. Là-dessus, je m’entremis d’apaiser ce différend, et
priai ces messieurs de le laisser en paix pour l’amour de moi : ainsi
je le délivrai du supplice [1] . »
[1] Ch. IX. La clef de l’ouvrage nous apprend qu’il
s’agit ici de Hardy.
Il n’y a pas là de volée de bois vert, mais la chose revient à peu

près au même, et nous n’avons pas besoin de dire que cette étude,
pour s’attacher spécialement aux coups de bâton, n’exclut
néanmoins ni les soufflets, ni les coups de poing, ni les coups de
pied, ni les autres gentillesses de même nature qu’on n’administrait
guère aux écrivains que lorsque l’instrument ordinaire de ces
corrections à l’amiable venait à faire défaut.
Un poëte aux gages des comédiens, c’était quelque chose de
triste ; mais un poëte aux gages des grands seigneurs, ce n’était pas
beaucoup plus gai : on le verra bientôt. Or telle était, surtout dans la
première moitié du dix-septième siècle, la condition sociale de la
plupart des écrivains. Tous, ou presque tous, appartenaient à
quelque comte, duc ou marquis ; étaient les domestiques (suivant le
terme reçu) de quelque grande maison. Ils payaient la protection en
bons mots et en dédicaces où ils élevaient le protecteur aux nues,
tantôt le mettant au-dessus de Mécène et d’Auguste, et tantôt
prouvant, à grand renfort de textes, que son avénement avait été
prédit par Moïse et par les prophètes. Quelques-uns, comme
Neufgermain, le poëte hétéroclite de Monsieur, ou le bonhomme
Rangouze, ou le comte de Permission, faisaient un commerce
spécial et exclusif d’épîtres dédicatoires. La mendicité littéraire était
largement et savamment organisée du haut en bas de l’échelle.
Corneille même tâchait de prendre à la glu les écus complaisants du
financier Montauron. La Fontaine allait jusqu’à payer en vers chaque
quartier de pension ; il donnait ses quittances en ballades ou
rondeaux qu’on peut lire dans ses œuvres. Tous, en un mot,
méritaient la cruelle épigramme dont les fustigeait Scarron, — qui
pourtant abusa plus que pas un de cette quémanderie effrontée, —
en dédiant une partie de ses œuvres burlesques « à très-honnête et
très-divertissante chienne dame Guillemette, levrette de ma sœur »,
et Furetière, en traçant, dans son Roman bourgeois, le modèle d’une
épître dédicatoire au bourreau, sans parler de Sorel, de
mademoiselle de Scudéry, et de vingt autres qui tous ont vertement
daubé sur la honteuse spéculation des épîtres liminaires.
Cette domesticité, sur laquelle nous sommes forcé d’appuyer
quelque peu, parce qu’on y trouve la source et l’explication des faits
bizarres dont nous nous constituons l’historien, était non-seulement
acceptée, mais revendiquée avec un soin jaloux par les écrivains,
jusque dans ses avantages et profits les plus humiliants. Ménage,
par économie, mène deux laquais dîner avec lui chez le cardinal de
Retz, les y établit pendant cinq mois, malgré les représentations de
l’argentier, et y prend sa chandelle. Chapelain, le roi des poëtes
d’alors, passe du service de monseigneur de Noailles aux gages du
duc de Longueville, qui lui offrait un traitement plus considérable,
comme un valet de bonne maison qu’on enlève à un rival en
enchérissant sur ses prix. A l’exemple de Chapelain, Esprit, de
l’Académie, qui était d’abord à madame de Longueville, passe au
chancelier Séguier. Boisrobert appartenait au cardinal, et faisait
partie de sa ménagerie comme ses chats ; Sarrazin était à la
princesse de Conti ; Costar, à l’abbé de Lavardin ; la Mesnardière, à
madame de Sablé. Pas un qui n’eût son patron, dont il portait le
collier, avec le nom gravé dessus. Théophile et Mairet recevaient
des gages de monseigneur de Montmorency pour faire des vers en
son nom, lui fabriquer ses mots et lui apprendre les jugements qu’il
devait porter sur les choses courantes. Et ces gens de lettres
domestiques avaient à leur tour d’autres gens de lettres
domestiques en sous-ordre, comme Pauquet, qui appartenait à
Costar, et Girault à Ménage.
Il faut avouer tout d’abord, et même proclamer bien haut, que, si
les écrivains n’étaient pas plus respectés, c’est qu’ils ne savaient
pas se faire respecter eux-mêmes. Élevés dans la servitude, ils en
avaient contracté tous les vices. Sous Richelieu et Mazarin, les trois
quarts des gens de lettres étaient plus ou moins débauchés, joueurs,
parasites, coureurs de cabarets et de lieux équivoques. Ils
s’intitulaient fièrement libertins et poëtes rouges-trognes. La Croix-
de-Fer et le Cormier étaient leurs académies ; la bouteille, leur muse
inspiratrice, et, au dessert, gorgés de cervelas, de petit salé, de
melon, de tous ces mets excitant à bien boire qu’a chantés Saint-
Amant avec un enthousiasme puisé aux entrailles du sujet, chauds
de vin et de luxure, ils écrivaient sur la nappe salie les honteuses
priapées du Cabinet satirique.
Du côté de la morale, comme du côté de l’indépendance, la
dignité littéraire était donc alors chose à peu près inconnue chez les
écrivains de profession, surtout avant Racine et Boileau. Ce dernier
en était si frappé, que, dans son Art poétique, en particulier dans le
quatrième chant, il s’est appliqué à relever le caractère de l’homme
de lettres autant qu’à perfectionner son talent : au milieu des erreurs
de critique de Boileau, et de ses jugements souvent contestés
aujourd’hui, il est juste de lui tenir compte de ce noble effort. Au
temps de ces deux poëtes, la dignité du corps littéraire est loin d’être
complète sans doute, mais elle a du moins fait un grand pas :
l’écrivain n’est plus aux gages des seigneurs qui le payent en
l’attachant à leur maison, mais du roi qui le pensionne, en lui laissant
son indépendance matérielle. La sphère où il vit, le rang qu’il
occupe, sa considération, la nature de ses travaux, tout s’est élevé à
la fois, — premier acheminement, bien insuffisant encore, à l’époque
d’émancipation où il ne relèvera plus que du public, dont il peut
même devenir le souverain à son tour.
Les courtisans voulaient bien, sans doute, frayer jusqu’à un
certain point avec les beaux esprits en titre, mais dans les limites
fixées par la mode et leur vanité personnelle. Ils daignaient les
admettre à leurs parties fines chez Crenet ou la Coiffier, mais
comme des amuseurs chargés d’égayer la débauche, et non en
qualité de compagnons et d’égaux. A défaut d’un sens moral
suffisant, il n’eût fallu d’ailleurs aux écrivains qu’un peu de réflexion
pour comprendre à quel point ces associations dans l’orgie étaient
avilissantes et dangereuses pour eux : c’était le plus sûr moyen de
se dépouiller eux-mêmes du peu de respect qu’on eût pu conserver
encore à leur égard.
Que restait-il donc pour retenir et enchaîner, au besoin, le
courroux de MM. les gentilshommes ? La considération littéraire ?
Mais, à supposer même que les œuvres légères de ces poëtes
d’alcôve et de cabaret fussent dignes d’inspirer un pareil sentiment,
la considération littéraire n’a guère de puissance, si elle n’est
soutenue par la considération morale. Et puis ces hauts et puissants
seigneurs se souciaient bien de la littérature ! Non-seulement la
plupart ne cachaient pas leur ignorance, mais ils s’en targuaient
comme d’une qualité de race, qui sentait son homme du monde et
son parfait courtisan. M. de Montbazon, qui, selon Bautru [2] , n’avait
« rien à mespris comme un homme sçavant », n’était nullement une
exception dans la première moitié du siècle. Plus tard, le
commandeur de Jars s’indignait de voir ses confrères dégénérer de
leurs ancêtres, en se pliant à l’étude : « Du latin ! s’écriait-il avec une
indignation burlesque. De mon temps, d’homme d’honneur, le latin
eût déshonoré un gentilhomme [3] . » Ces messieurs n’en
prétendaient pas moins juger les œuvres d’esprit ; parfois même ils
s’essayaient, tout en s’excusant de déroger ainsi, à composer de
petits vers galants, mais des vers qui eussent l’air de cour, et Guéret
nous apprend [4] que cette manie s’était étendue jusqu’aux gens de
lettres, dont la plus grande préoccupation était de faire croire qu’ils
écrivaient par pur délassement, sans vouloir, à aucun prix, passer
pour auteurs de profession.
[2] L’Onosandre ou le Grossier, satire.
[3] Saint-Évremont, Lettre à M. D***.
[4] Parnasse réformé, p. 65.
Voyez Mascarille, dans les Précieuses ridicules [5] : « Je travaille

à mettre en madrigaux toute l’histoire romaine. Cela est au-dessous
de ma condition, mais je le fais seulement pour donner à gagner aux
libraires qui me persécutent. » Et remarquez que les gentilshommes
dont Molière a voulu présenter la satire dans ce plaisant personnage
étaient justement les plus lettrés, les hôtes habituels de la petite
chambre bleue et les courtisans des précieuses. Écoutez maintenant
le marquis de Villennes, dans la préface de sa traduction des
Amours d’Ovide, en 1668, c’est-à-dire au cœur du grand siècle :
« On s’étonnera peut-être qu’un homme de ma naissance et de ma
profession se soit donné le loisir de s’attacher à cet ouvrage. »
Mascarille n’avait pas mieux dit, et M. de Scudéry lui-même eût été
satisfait.
[5] Sc. 10.
On peut comprendre maintenant ce passage du Roman
comique [6] , que nous avons réservé comme la conclusion naturelle
des observations précédentes : « Il étoit bel esprit, dit Scarron en
parlant d’un hobereau campagnard, par la raison que tout le monde
presque se pique d’être sensible aux divertissements de l’esprit, tant
ceux qui les connoissent que les ignorants présomptueux ou brutaux
qui jugent témérairement des vers et de la prose, encore qu’ils
croient qu’il y a du déshonneur à bien écrire, et qu’ils reprocheroient,
en cas de besoin, à un homme qu’il fait des livres, comme ils lui
reprocheroient qu’il fait de la fausse monnoie. »
[6] II, ch. VIII.
II
Tout gentilhomme était donc rempli de dédain pour les auteurs en

titre, et, s’il semblait oublier quelquefois la distance qui le séparait de
ces petits grimauds, barbouilleurs de papier, c’était à condition que
ceux-ci ne l’oublieraient point trop eux-mêmes. Et puis, après avoir
tremblé tout le jour devant le moindre froncement de sourcil de son
Jupiter Olympien, il était bien aise de se consoler de son
abaissement en tranchant du souverain à son tour, et de se venger
d’une infériorité intellectuelle dont il avait conscience, par la
supériorité brutale de la force.
Les lettres de Malherbe nous apprennent que Louis XIII fit
appliquer une douzaine de coups de bâton à un valet de pied qui se
disputait avec ses pages sur une question de préséance, ni plus ni
moins qu’un duc et pair. Le roi, dit Tallemant, ne voulait pas que ses
premiers valets de chambre fussent gentilshommes, afin de pouvoir
les battre à son envie. Le frère de Louis XIII, Gaston d’Orléans, fit
jeter dans le canal, à Fontainebleau, un gentilhomme qui ne lui avait
pas témoigné suffisamment de respect. Louis XIV s’oublia une fois
jusqu’à lever sa canne sur un valet de chambre ; une autre fois, il la
lança par la fenêtre pour se dérober à la tentation d’en châtier
Lauzun ; et, dans une autre circonstance encore, il eût, sans
madame de Maintenon, frappé Louvois avec les pincettes de son
appartement. Ces procédés autocratiques étaient fort en usage
aussi parmi les gentilshommes, ne fût-ce que par imitation, et pour
se régler sur les manières royales.
Comme Louis XIII et Louis XIV, c’était surtout le bâton que les
courtisans considéraient comme l’ultima ratio dans leurs rapports
avec les gens de rien, en particulier avec les auteurs. A leurs yeux,
ceux-ci étaient gent bâtonnable à merci toutes les fois qu’ils avaient
besoin d’être redressés ; et il paraît qu’ils en avaient souvent besoin,
car on les bâtonna souvent.
Il était tout simple, du reste, que ducs et marquis, après avoir
humé longuement l’encens des dédicaces enivrantes, prissent au
mot les hyperboles répétées de leurs faméliques adorateurs, et
crussent à leur suprématie absolue sur ces pauvres poëtes, leurs
parasites et leurs domestiques, qu’ils payaient en beaux écus
sonnants, non contents de les approvisionner de vivres, de bois et
de chandelle. Comment ne les auraient-ils pas regardés dès lors
comme de piètres personnages dont on pouvait s’égayer sans
conséquence, de même qu’on s’égaye, pour peu qu’on en ait envie,
d’un bouffon ou d’un laquais ?
Aussi voyez : Saint-Amant, malgré sa fierté, se représente
amusant son duc à ses dépens, et sortant de ce jeu en sueur.
Voiture est berné par ses protecteurs, et en plaisante avec une
joyeuse effronterie d’humilité. Or, pour donner au lecteur une idée de
ce qu’était la berne [7] , dans le sens propre du mot, nous ne pouvons
mieux faire que de renvoyer à la pièce dans laquelle le chantre de la
Crevaille a décrit ce supplice avec sa verve ordinaire, ou de citer
notre auteur, lorsqu’il écrit à mademoiselle de Bourbon, en 1630 :
[7] Un neveu de Mazarin en mourut, au collége de
Clermont.
« Mademoiselle, je fus berné, vendredi, après dîner, pour ce que

je ne vous avois pas fait rire dans le temps que l’on m’avoit donné
pour cela, et madame de Rambouillet en donna l’arrêt, à la requête
de mademoiselle sa fille et de mademoiselle Paulet… J’eus beau
crier et me défendre ; la couverture fut apportée, et quatre des plus
forts hommes du monde furent choisis pour cela. Ce que je puis
vous dire, Mademoiselle, c’est que jamais personne ne fut si haut
que moi, et que je ne croyois pas que la fortune me dût jamais tant
élever. A tout coup ils me perdoient de vue, et m’envoyoient plus
haut que les aigles ne peuvent monter. Je vis les montagnes
abaissées au-dessous de moi ; je vis les vents et les nuées
cheminer dessous mes pieds ; je découvris des pays que je n’avois
jamais vus, et des mers que je n’avois point imaginées. Mais je vous
assure, Mademoiselle, que l’on ne voit tout cela qu’avec inquiétude,
lorsque l’on est en l’air et que l’on est assuré d’aller retomber. Une
des choses qui m’effrayoient le plus étoit que, lorsque j’étois bien
haut et que je regardois en bas, la couverture me paroissoit si petite,
qu’il me sembloit impossible que je retombasse dedans, et je vous
avoue que cela me donnoit quelque émotion. Mais, parmi tant
d’objets différents qui en même temps frappèrent mes yeux, il y en
eut un qui, pour quelques moments, m’ôta de crainte et me toucha
d’un véritable plaisir : c’est, Mademoiselle, qu’ayant voulu regarder
vers le Piémont pour voir ce que l’on y faisoit, je vous vis dans Lyon,
que vous passiez la Saône : au moins, je vis sur l’eau une grande
lumière et beaucoup de rayons à l’entour du plus beau visage du
monde… Dès que je fus en bas, je leur voulus dire de vos nouvelles
et les assurai que je vous avois vue, mais ils se prirent à rire, comme
si j’avois dit une chose impossible, et recommencèrent à me faire
sauter mieux que devant… Le dernier coup qu’ils me jetèrent en l’air,
je me trouvai dans une troupe de grues, lesquelles, d’abord, furent
étonnées de me voir si haut ; mais, quand elles m’eurent approché,
elles me prirent pour un des pygmées avec lesquels vous savez
bien, Mademoiselle, qu’elles ont guerre de tout temps. Aussitôt elles
vinrent fondre sur moi à grands coups de bec, et d’une telle violence,
que je crus être percé de cent coups de poignards ; et une d’elles,
qui m’avait pris par la jambe, me poursuivit si opiniâtrément, qu’elle
ne me laissa point que je ne fusse dans la couverture. Cela fit
appréhender à ceux qui me tourmentoient de me remettre encore à
la merci de mes ennemis : on me rapporta donc à mon logis dans la
même couverture, si abattu qu’il n’est pas possible de l’être plus.
Aussi, à dire le vrai, cet exercice est un peu violent pour un homme
aussi foible que je suis. »
On n’a jamais fait meilleur marché de sa personne, ni débité de
plus agréables sornettes sur un plus humiliant badinage. Il n’est
guère possible de ne voir ici qu’un conte en l’air, une simple
réminiscence du chapitre de Don Quichotte où l’on berne Sancho
Pança, surtout avec la note très-précise que Tallemant des Réaux,
fort bien informé sur le compte de Voiture, dont il s’est fait le
commentateur, a mise à cette lettre. Que ce ne fût là qu’une
plaisanterie, comme on s’en permettait assez souvent à l’hôtel
Rambouillet, il n’y a pas à en douter, et je ne prétends nullement qu’il
faille y voir une punition sérieuse. Seulement cette plaisanterie,
qu’on ne se fût certes pas permise envers tout autre qu’un petit
poëte, chargé d’amuser quand même, marque bien d’une part le peu
de respect qu’on avait pour ce supplicié d’une nouvelle sorte, de
l’autre le peu de dignité de celui qui trouvait cela tout simple et n’y
voyait qu’un joli thème à d’ingénieux concetti.
Et pourtant il ne faut pas l’oublier, l’hôtel de Rambouillet, sorte
d’académie qui devança l’autre et qui la surpassa toujours dans
l’opinion publique, était le sanctuaire vénéré des beaux esprits ; nulle
part ils n’auraient pu trouver autant d’admiration et d’égards. De son
côté, Voiture, un des premiers bourgeois reçus dans la haute
société, suivant la remarque de M. de Chateaubriand, était le roi de
l’hôtel, et pour aucun autre on n’avait plus de considération que pour
ce sémillant petit homme. Cette observation ajoute encore à la
portée de l’exemple que nous venons de citer.
Régnier a dit [8] :
Encore quelques grands afin de faire voir,

De Mœcène rivaux, qu’ils ayment le sçavoir,
Nous voyent de bon œil, et tenant une gaule,
Ainsi qu’à leurs chevaux nous en flattent l’épaule,
Avecques bonne mine, et d’un langage doux
Nous disent souriant : « Eh bien, que faictes-vous ? »
[8] Satire 4e.

Il ne s’agit pas ici, sans doute, de coups de canne, comme l’a cru
le commentateur Lenglet-Dufresnoy ; mais on conviendra du moins
que ces singulières familiarités, dont les poëtes partageaient le
bénéfice avec les chevaux, étaient compromettantes et pouvaient
conduire facilement plus loin. Il suffisait d’un mouvement de colère
pour que la caresse amicale de la houssine, plus fortement appuyée,
se changeât en un coup de cravache, et, je l’ai dit, les grands se
mettaient aisément en colère.
Un peu plus tard, en 1621, Courval-Sonnet s’écriait, dans sa
première satire :
Qui donc voudroit escrire en temps si perilleux,

Sans s’exposer en butte aux esprits orgueilleux
Qui feront de nos vers une capilotade,
Ou bien leur donneront la gesne ou l’estrapade ?
Et ce n’était pas là une fiction poétique : nous ne le verrons que

trop.
Cet usage était si bien admis par les mœurs comme une chose
parfaitement naturelle, que mademoiselle de Ségur parlait ainsi à
Benserade qui l’avait chansonnée : « Dans notre race, il n’y a point
de poëte pour vous rendre la pareille, mais il y a bien des gens qui
vous traiteront en poëte si vous y retournez. » Traiter en poëte,
c’était un terme reçu ; et, sans qu’il fût besoin de s’expliquer
davantage, tout le monde savait ce que cela voulait dire. Il y avait
encore d’autres expressions toutes faites, comme en créent les
besoins et les usages de chaque époque. Arlequin disait, au
Théâtre-Italien, d’un auteur vertement fustigé pour quelques mots
trop libres contre un grand personnage : « Sa pièce lui a valu mille
écus, sans compter le tour du bâton. » Et l’auditoire de rire à cette
fine plaisanterie tout à fait de circonstance, et comprise à demi-mot.
Un autre Arlequin, cette fois au théâtre de la Foire [9] , rencontrant
Apollon sur le Parnasse : « Je vais, lui disait-il, vous payer en
monnaie courante du pays. » Et il s’escrimait de sa batte sur le dos
du dieu.

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Note on Citations / 117

Conference: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Question of Another World, II,”

with Du Bois’s initiative in engaging the radical order of the organization

If one accepts the epistemic imperatives of the example, its status as an

We can open our consideration in medias res, as it were, by reckoning that

Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed

To stand with Du Bois in this vocative position shall we say is to exist on

nineteenth-century thinker’s “project that elucidates the nature and limit of

Scales intended by civil law to be a standard measure in trade,

at a unanimous result [einstimmiges Fazit] by comparing the

I leave aside here any attempt to offer the fulsomeness of my engagement

judgment are practical-theoretical: they are concerned to determine, what

of problematics crisscrossing, as some possible impossible whole, the thought

Should we not recognize Du Bois’s formulation on “the meaning of being

of a certain Marxism be simply granted by his reflection. While remaining

to open on its other side to a whole dimension of historicity, one perhaps

for him as an effect of his participation in the Exposition Universelle held at

There is slowly arising not only a curiously, strong brotherhood

This apparently prosaic proposition by Du Bois mobilizes an ensemble of

Most profoundly here a certain form of hyperbolic renarrativization of

lead the way to a new horizon of human freedom, then an understanding

Who counts, can be given an account, or can be given, as European?

or an ultimate good would remain open or susceptible to only an ambiv-

Author: Victor Fournel

Release date: November 10, 2023 [eBook #72091]

Original publication: Paris: A. Delahays, 1858

Credits: Laurent Vogel and the Online Distributed Proofreading

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DU RÔLE

Le sujet que nous nous proposons de traiter ici pourrait fournir

Nous ne remonterons pas plus haut que le dix-septième siècle :

Il n’y a pas là de volée de bois vert, mais la chose revient à peu

Voyez Mascarille, dans les Précieuses ridicules [5] : « Je travaille

Tout gentilhomme était donc rempli de dédain pour les auteurs en

« Mademoiselle, je fus berné, vendredi, après dîner, pour ce que

Encore quelques grands afin de faire voir,

[8] Satire 4e.